Inheriting the Narratives of Dementia: A Collaborative Tale of a Daughter and Mother

This collaborative tale of a daughter and mother offers multiple stories of the two matriarchs in our family, our relationships with them, and the lessons we take from our narrative lives about how we are to be as family members, and how we are to be as family aging with dementia. Our narrative inheritance of dementia leaves us to uncover and interpret family narratives as we author our own future with dementia as caregivers to one another. The stories we tell provide us insight into the manner in which themes of loss, denial, anxiety, appearance, and care complexly weave through our experiences with dementia in the family offering both theoretical and practical implications for the study of family narratives of illness.